ONE of Elliott Smith’s half-sisters, Ashley Welch, came to stay with him in Brooklyn over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend of 1997. Just seven years old when Smith left Duncanville, Texas (where he was raised) for Portland, Welch was now at university in California. She kept a photo of Smith reading her a bedtime story when she was a toddler, but they hardly knew each other at all. The weekend began a tradition: Welch was to spend the next five Thanksgivings he was alive with her half-brother.
Smith took Welch out in New York, which is to say they toured his favourite bars. She couldn’t help but notice how much he drank, but Smith was otherwise on his best behaviour. They ate Thanksgiving dinner together in his Park Slope apartment. Smith christened the turkey ‘Tom’ and carved it at the table. A happy family of just the two of them and with him playing Dad.
For Smith, this kind of sense of normality wasn’t to last for long. The following Thursday night, he went into the city with [Smith’s publicist] Dorien Garry to see Gus Van Sant’s film, Good Will Hunting. Smith sat there in the dark of the theatre, hearing songs he wrote alone in basements in Portland front and centre of a hit movie. The next morning, the New York Times’ film critic Janet Maslin cooed: “Good Will Hunting has fine acting, steady momentum, a sharp eye and a very warm heart.”
On January 14, 1998, Smith returned to Portland to play a knockabout show at La Luna. The evening was a Kinks tribute, a chance for him to let his hair down and catch up with old friends such as Larry Crane and Pete Krebs. Afterwards, he sat up at the bar with Krebs like they used to do after their shifts putting up dry wall. For a moment, they were as easy together as they had always been, but then, just as abruptly, the whole tone of the evening darkened. There was simply too much distance growing between them for things to ever again snap back to being the way they were.
“I was drunksays Krebs. “Elliott got really upset. He reached out to me and he was like, ‘Pete, I’m really sorry.’ I just said to him, ‘Hey, no, man, I’ve got to go.’ Ever since, I’ve always felt pretty awful about that night. The envy was short-lived for me. You see someone you’ve spent a couple of years hanging around with doing really well and, you know, you want to experience the same thing. You’ve had too much to drink and you say something about it.
